Towers of strength face a retirement of abandonment and collapse

JUST as paintings “go into a wall” over time, as their owners become so used to them that they hardly notice them any more, so a once-dominant feature of the Irish coastline has become almost invisible.

It’s the Martello tower.

The only places where Martello towers still present a blunt, stark and unmistakable profile are the island sites, where they still stand free of other buildings. In sharp contrast, many of the towers on land have been overtaken, surrounded and diminished in locational importance by the encroachment of railway bridges, blocks of apartments, schools and shops.

Originally built in exposed coastal areas of minimal population, they have been peacefully integrated into a landscape they were intended to dominate and threaten, and so, if mention is made of the large number still extant around Britain and Ireland, people first of all look disbelieving: “Lots of Martellos? Not at all. Sure, there was never more than a handful.”

Typically, they then mention the most famous of them all, the one now housing the Joyce museum in Sandymount, or one they recall from childhood visits to the beaches at Portrane or Balbriggan, each overlooked by a hulking Martello. Then another comes to mind. As the count rises, so too does curiosity about a necklace of fortresses built at unprecedented speed and cost.

The Martellos were a unique contribution to the Irish landscape: Enormously robust and constructed to a similar, but not prescriptive design, they went up in two remarkably short periods of time. The first set were erected from 1804 to 1806, with a second phase going up between 1810 and 1815. The earliest was on Bere Island, built for the Royal Navy, whose local commander wanted to defend supply ships anchoring off the island, with another going up shortly afterwards on Garinish Island off Glengarriff.

The name “Martello” is a bowdlerised version of the location of a tower the British besieged in Cape Mortella, Corsica, in 1796. Its staunch solidity took so long to overcome that it made the British curious about the characteristics which had allowed its defence by a relatively small garrison. So, after their victory, the British occupied the tower for two years, forming a kind of tutorial for army officers with an architectural bent, who measured, counted and recorded almost every stone, distance, aperture and staircase inside it.

Having demonstrated respect for the defensive structure by capturing every aspect of the tower in beautifully detailed drawings, the British then ruined it.

“The Mortella Tower was effectively demolished at 8 o’clock last night,” Admiral Sir John Jervis wrote from his perch on HMS Victory. “Two thirds of the circumference tumbled in numerous fragments. The other third, towards the bay, shook to the foundations.”

Most of that other third is still to be seen by hill-walking tourists in Corsica. At least the tower had fulfilled its purpose, before the British Army decided to prevent it causing them further trouble, whereas the Irish Martellos, built to fend off an anticipated maritime Napoleonic invasion, never saw action, because Napoleon turned his attentions — disastrously, for him — to the east, rather than to the north.

Before that transpired, however, it was decided to protect Ireland (and southern England) against the possibility of French-led seaborne invasion by a network of Martellos, erected, as The Freeman’s Journal put it, with “unexampled dispatch”.

So speedy was the build that in some cases the tower was solidly present on a man’s land before anybody got around to a) telling him it was going to be there, and b) handing him any cash in compensation. A landowner based overseas might, on a subsequent visit to his Irish land-ownings, find on them a tower of hewn granite or rendered rubble, 40ft in diameter with walls 8ft thick on the land side and 9ft thick on the sea side. It was not a great position from which to negotiate a fair price for the use of the land, although that wasn’t the only constraint, as a new history* points out.

“Often, the price ultimately paid for the land did not so much reflect the size or value of the plot as much as the political and social status of the landowner,” it states.

In north Dublin, for example, where the average price paid was about £50, Thomas Newcommen and John Crosbie managed to get double that for the site at Red Rock in Sutton, and another, less fortunate, owner of less political clout got little more than a tenner for his land.

“In contrast,” the historians note, “the incredible sum of £600 was paid to the Earl of Howth for two plots at Howth and Ireland’s Eye”.

Local quarries provided the stone for the towers, the entrances at the first floor overlooked by a machicolation featuring “murder holes” through which boiling pitch could be poured on would-be intruders from the land side. Despite the Fenian activity in Ireland at the time the Martellos took shape, only one of the fortresses was ever attacked — and even in that exceptional case, “attack” might be putting it a little strongly.

What actually happened was an incursion into the Martello at Fota, which was occupied by two gunners of the Royal Artillery, together with their wives and (between them) five children. In December, 1867, The Freeman’s Journal reported that, the previous Thursday, around five in the evening, when one of the men was having his tea, a party of men let themselves in the open front door, “and presenting a revolver at his head, told him not to stir” and made off with the guns and swords on open racks within the tower.

OTHER than Fenian burglary, the life of the Martello towers around the coast, for their first century, was almost uniformly dull. Retired soldiers were put into some of them as “invalid gunners,” but, over time, keeping the cannons oiled and ready for action on the roof of each tower became self- evidently pointless. The furnace racks whereon it had been planned to cook the cannonballs to white heat (all the better to set fire to the sails of incoming ships, my dear) began to rust.

The most expensive defensive structures ever built ceased to be anything other than an embarrassment. The powers that be let some of them move into private ownership, allowed a few to collapse due to coastal erosion and abandoned the remainder to rot, unused. A few are museums. Some have ended up refurbished and accessible to the public. The one where I live, Number 7 on the northside of Dublin, in common with others, will be open to the public each morning during Heritage Week, which begins on the 18th of the month.

The shame is that we haven’t yet found a way to anchor cultural and history-related tourism in this string of engineering and architectural marvels, using them to draw visitors on a coastal tour of the country.

* The Martello Towers of Dublin, by Jason Bolton, Tim Carey, Rob Goodbody, and Gerry Clabby is published by Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown and Fingal County Council and costs €25.